Stocks rise on reports of Obama plan for bad bank assets
White-hot worries about the country’s banks have cooled noticeably as expectations have grown that the Obama administration will create a “bad bank” to clean all the toxic debt off the financial sector’s balance sheets.
Speculation about such a plan, raising hope that financial institutions could eventually emerge from the welter of bad loans that have weighed them down, caused share prices of banking companies to surge, pushing the overall stock market up sharply.
An index of 24 bank stocks shot up 14%. The broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index climbed 3.4%, while the Dow Jones industrial average gained more than 200 points, or 2.5%. Stocks in Europe also rallied on optimism about the financial sector.
“The message of the markets has been that there may be light at the end of this tunnel,” said Hugh Johnson, head of Johnson Illington Advisors in Albany, N.Y.
Shares of Citigroup Inc. gained 19%, while Bank of America Corp. surged 14%, JPMorgan Chase Inc. climbed 10% and money manager State Street Corp. ballooned 31%.
Despite getting capital infusions in the tens of billions of dollars from the federal government since last fall, banks still have been viewed with concern, in large part because of home loans and mortgage-backed securities -- assets that have generated fresh losses each quarter as the housing downturn has accelerated.
Freeing banks of those assets was the idea behind the government’s original bailout plan, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But it was abandoned in part because of questions over how much the government would pay. Underpaying could leave banks with insufficient capital, whereas overpaying would reward them at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
Anticipation of a bad-bank plan also eased fears that the government would move to take more drastic action to nationalize the industry, which has rattled investors all month.
“There’s just a little bit more of a level of confidence that the government is doing something without saying, ‘We’re going to call the shots from here on out,’ ” said Joe Cusick, senior market analyst at Chicago-based brokerage OptionsXpress.
The rally trumped a continuing string of disappointing bank earnings reports -- the latest coming Wednesday from Wells Fargo & Co.
Wells Fargo shares swelled 31% even though the San Francisco company reported a net loss of $2.6 billion. The bank also wrote down by $37.2 billion a portfolio of risky loans inherited from Wachovia Corp., which Wells bought during the quarter.
Investors, however, were comforted that Wells Fargo maintained its 34-cent quarterly dividend, which some had feared would be cut after similar moves at other companies.
Some experts, citing the troubled state of the economy, expressed skepticism that the bank-stock rally could continue.
“The fact that we have to bring out TARP 2 tells you we have real serious problems with the banks,” said Bill King, chief market strategist at M. Ramsey King Securities in Burr Ridge, Ill.
The Dow rose 200.72 points to 8,375.45. The S&P; 500 gained 28.38 points to 874.09.
The Nasdaq composite index advanced 53.44 points, or 3.6%, to 1,558.34 as technology stocks rose strongly. Apple climbed 4%, Google increased 5% and Yahoo jumped 8%.
In addition, Sun Microsystems surged 22%, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion gained 5% and Lam Research jumped 6.5%.
Overseas, key stock indexes advanced 2.4% in Britain, 4.5% in Germany, 4.1% in France and 0.6% in Japan.
In the U.S., stock investors took solace in a pledge by the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low “for some time” and to consider a range of economic remedies.
But yields on Treasury bonds rose sharply after the Fed, at the conclusion of a two-day meeting of its policymaking committee, failed to promise a program to buy longer-term Treasuries, something the central bank has said it was considering.
The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond jumped to 3.42% from 3.24% on Tuesday. The yield on the 10-year T-note climbed to 2.65% from 2.52%.
